The propellers of an Iranian passenger plane inexplicably went into reverse just before it crashed in the United Arab Emirates last month, killing 43 people, an aviation official has been quoted as saying.
Mohammed Ghanim al-Ghaith, director of UAE's civil aviation authority, said a probe of the data and voice recorders of the Kish Airline plane was yet to show whether the cause of the crash was technical or human error, newspapers reported on Wednesday.
"The flight data recorders...show that 10 seconds before the disaster, the two engines of the airplane turned into a reverse mode," Ghaith said, adding that this caused the plane to decelerate rapidly.
The crash investigation was expected to be completed within four months, Gulf News daily quoted Ghaith as saying.
The Dutch-made Fokker-50, on a flight from Iran's Kish Island in the Gulf, crashed near Sharjah airport on February 10, killing all but three of the 46 people on board, most of them migrant workers.
Kish had been a popular destination for foreign workers in the UAE who needed to leave the country to renew residence and work permits. The Gulf Arab state has since cancelled rules requiring most such trips.